American Churches in Germany
Most churches original to Germany have correlate bodies in North America, and many churches original to North America are derived from movements with roots in Europe that have also touched Germany.
There are, however, some peculiarly “American” churches in Germany, including the Seventh-Day Adventists (SDA); the Mormon Church, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS); and the Church of Christ, Scientist (CCS). Each of these groups is based on unique teachings of a particular leader that are given authority tantamount to Holy Scripture. It may thus be argued that they are not technically Christian churches. However, the SDA strove to become a part of the clear mainstream of Christian activity and faith. Stretching the definitions yet further, there is the Church of Scientology, which, aside from its name, makes no pretense of being Christian but is visibly present as an American institution in German cities. Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW) are also clearly visible, selling the internationally known publications of the Watchtower Society on German street corners.The LDS was founded by Joseph Smith in New York in 1830 and took its current name in 1838. It counts 36,000 members in 183 congregations in Germany. “Christian Science,” based on Mary Baker Eddy’s book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875), is taught in various “churches” in Germany. Like all other congregations of this church, they are directly subordinate to the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, which Eddy founded in 1895. The church has no ordained ministers, since Eddy in her authority “named the Bible and Science and Health as the Pastor for worldwide Churches of Christ, Scientist” (“About the Church of Christ, Scientist” 2004). In a certain parallel to CCS, the Church of Scientology is also centrally administered much like a business enterprise.
It, too, is based on the one work of one individual, Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard (1950).Charles Taze Russell started the Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society, which controls the Jehovah’s Witnesses, in 1881 in Allegheny (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). There are 165,935 “witnesses” in 2,175 congregations in Germany.
Aside from the groups above, the success of free church groups in Germany has been based on the vitality and accessibility of the American and British religious experience, which has created an interest among Germans in such American groups. Both those churches rooted in the American tradition that seek to work among people native to Germany and those groups that seek to minister to expatriates can generally be contrasted to traditional German Protestant religious groups on the basis of (1) a lively and family-like fellowship among the faithful, as opposed to an individualistic and often highly intellectual or abstract experience of faith and worship; and (2) the expectation of personal decision and personal involvement on the part of the faithful, which includes voluntary commitment of heart, mind, lifestyle, and financial resources, rather than quiet assent to largely impersonal, often bureaucratic structures of governance, pastoral care, worship, and finances.
Church groups that have found their way to Germany from the United States have often come simultaneously or at an earlier time from Great Britain, where the American and British manifestations had common or similar origins. Methodists, for example, arrived in Germany in at least four different thrusts. The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in London acquiesced to pleas from people in Win- nenden, Wurttemberg, for a missionary to revitalize moribund extrachurch pietistic societies there by sending a “native son,” Christoph Gottlob Muller (1785—1858), as missionary in 1832. After Muller’s death, these British efforts moved primarily eastward to Augsburg, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, and beyond.
By 1897 longstanding efforts to combine British and American Methodist missionary endeavors in Germany resulted in a unified mission under American leadership, ending a specifically British presence.The wish of immigrants to America to be at work in Germany, explicitly stated by German American publicist Wilhelm Nast after a tour in 1844, was especially encouraged in 1848, after the national-liberal revolution had begun to succeed in overthrowing the princes of the German petty states and replacing their regimes with democratic structures but before the ultimate failure of this effort. Ludwig Sigismund Jacoby, a German of Jewish origin who had converted to Methodism in the United States, returned to Germany as missionary superintendent in 1849, with a base in Bremen, where a book publishing mission began under the banner of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC, Bis- chofliche Methodistenkirche). Both the MEC, the Evangelical Association (EG, Evangelische Gemeinschaft) and the United Brethren in Christ Church (UB) charged German-born and Germanspeaking Americans to fulfill their strong calling to bring their respective varieties of Methodism to friends and relatives in Germany.
The UB lacked the typically strict structure of other early Methodist bodies. It later united with the Methodists in Germany (MEC) and with the EG in the United States (EUB). The EG found its origins among Methodists in Pennsylvania, when founder Jacob Albright (Jakob Albrecht) lost his membership in the local Methodist society for lack of attendance at meetings. He was spending his time preaching to Germans, while the early Methodists found enough to do working only with English speakers. The first MEC leader, Francis Asbury, turned down Albright’s offer to create a German-speaking branch of that church. Rebuffed but not discouraged, Albright organized the Newly Formed Methodist Connection (Albrechts- Leute) and translated Methodist foundational documents word-for-word for this German American Methodist church.
Methodist efforts met with moderate success, creating strongholds in Saxony and Wurttemberg and enjoying widespread acceptance in Bremen and Hamburg but facing an uphill struggle in most other parts of the countryside. Their task was made more difficult by the presence of hundreds of different jurisdictions without unity of law or policy—duchies, grand duchies, counties, principalities, electoral principalities, as well as imperial free cities, and free and Hanseatic cities. In 1850 leaders of the EG felt that they were in part answering the call of German church leaders like Johann Hinrich Wichern for spiritual renewal when they established a mission board to send two missionaries, one of them Conrad Link, to Stuttgart. The UB did not establish a German missionary effort until 1869, when Bavarian-born American Reverend Christian Bischoff went back to his native Naila. The work was turned over to the MEC in 1905. In 1940 a church union in the U.S. changed the name of the German MEC to “The Methodist Church” (MC). A second union in 1968 of the MC and EUB united EG and MC units in Germany in the United Methodist Church (UMC = Evangelisch-methodistische Kirche). In the year 2000, the United Methodist Church in Germany counted about 65,000 members in just over 600 congregations.
Baptists had a similar introduction into Germany, but their beginnings were much more of a one-man project. Johann Gerhard Oncken had emigrated to Great Britain in 1814 as teenage apprentice to a Scots tradesman. In a Methodist congregation in London he experienced a personal conversion and became an agent for the Continental Society for the Diffusion of Religious Knowledge over the Continent of Europe. In April 1834, two years after the London Methodists sent Muller to Winnenden, Oncken was ordained elder in the Baptist congregation in Hamburg that he had founded. Oncken then founded a Federation of Baptist Congregations, conceived of as a “great congregation” uniting all German Baptists.
By the time of his death, however, the individual congregations had taken upon themselves a much greater autonomy than he had envisioned, as was typical in many other branches of World Baptism. The Baptist call, “we consider every member as a missionary,” became a rallying cry for German Baptists. In response to this call, Gottfried Wilhelm Lehman engaged in missionary activities that led to the honorific title “Father of Baptists in Prussia.” And Julius Kobner, a Dane of Jewish origin, led the Baptist mission in the Rhineland and in Copenhagen. At the time of the 1848 revolutions he published the Manifesto from Free Primal Christianity to the German People, appealing for religious freedom in the new German social order, expected soon to be introduced. English and American Baptists are largely identified in the minds of many as sources of this movement, and although it was not strictly an “American” incursion onto German soil, contacts with Baptists in North America, Great Britain, and Scandinavia were clearly evident. The first director of the Oncken Publishing House in Hamburg was a German American. The European Baptist Federation (EBF) is a body separate from North American Baptist federations and conventions, but it is not aloof from issues known there in recent times. In more recent years, the EBF has included ministry in many languages, including English, throughout Europe. Additionally, the U.S. Southern Baptist Convention has been involved in providing expatriate Americans with congregational ministry in Europe, especially “off-base” from U.S. military units, where only “General Protestant” chaplaincy is available, with all the vicissitudes and compromises such a name implies. As of the year 2000, the German Baptists counted 87,000 members in 900 congregations.After the forging of the German nationstate in 1871, the country’s leaders focused on deciding what was “German” and what was not. Slowly, the sentiment grew that Socialist thinking, Roman Catholicism, and the so-called free churches were “foreign growths” (Dwyer 1978, 27) in the body politic of the German imperial state and were not to be encouraged.
This viewdid not substantially change even with the Weimar Constitution of 1919, but at least the seeds were sown at that time for a general acknowledgment of the positive contributions of many free churches when National Socialist rule was ended in 1945. Both during and after the Third Reich, some free churches were learning a new degree of cooperation in the Federation of Evangelical Free Churches (Vereinigung Evangelischer Freikirchen, VEF), which continues today alongside the Evangelical Alliance (Evangelische Allianz) as an instrument of free church and evangelical cooperation. These same churches have played a role in the greater ecumenical picture in modern Germany, especially in the local and national councils of churches, normally called “working associations” to avoid conflict with Catholic concepts of conciliarism. The national Association of Christian Churches (Arbeitsgemeinschaft christlicher Kirchen, ACK) provides a broad base for consultation and cooperation.
Among churches related to one or another of these cooperative efforts, the following can also be named among the “American” churches: The Church of the Nazarene (Kirche der Nazarener), a union of various Wesleyan and holiness groups created in Texas in 1908, formed its first congregation in Germany in 1959. Since 1966 it has maintained a seminary in Busingen near the Swiss German border. Today it counts 2,300 members in twenty congregations. The Muehlheim Federation of Free Church Protestant Congregations (Muhlheimer Verband Freikirchlicher Evangelischer Gemeinden) grew out of the international Pentecostal awakening at the beginning of the twentieth century. It understands its foundation to have been specifically precipitated by the rejection of Pentecostal phenomena by the innerchurch societies and other free churches brought to expression in the Berlin Declaration of 1909. The first congregation formed in 1905, and the association came into being between 1911 and 1913. Today it counts 2,900 members in fifty congregations. The Federation of Free Church Pentecost Congregations (Bund Freikirchlicher Pfingstge- meinden), first organized in 1954 but using that name only since 1982, is another of the associations of Pentecostal congregations that grew out of the worldwide Pentecostal awakening that started in Asuza Street in Los Angeles. It currently has 32,000 members in 500 congregations. The Freikirchlicher Bund der Gemeinde Gottes (Church of God, Anderson, Indiana) has been present in Germany since 1901. Founded by D. S. Warner in 1881, the church published its “Gospel Trumpet” in a German edition as early as 1885. It proposes to provide “light and salt” to German society and to contribute to the building of the kingdom of God. It counts 2,500 worshipers in thirty congregations. The Seventh-Day Adventists (Gemein- schaft der Siebenten-Tags-Adventisten) has been present in Germany since 1876. It has 36,000 members in 569 congregations. For the sake of completeness, the Salvation Army (Heilsarmee) should be mentioned. Founded in London in 1878 by Methodists, it is widely known in North America as well and was already present in Germany in 1886. Perhaps because of its military structure, the Salvation Army was banned by the NS regime in 1933 and was not readmitted to the territory of the former German Democratic Republic until 1990. It counts 2,000 “soldiers” (members) in l40 “corps” (congregations).
James A. Dwyer
See also Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod; U.S. Bases in West Germany
References and Further Reading
“About the Church of Christ, Scientist.” Church of Christ, Scientist. http://www.tfccs.com/aboutthechurch/ (cited September 9, 2004).
“Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden in Deutschland: Ein Uberblick des Kirchengeschichtlers Gunter Balders” (Erscheinungsdatum: 2003-06-01). http://www.baptisten.org/faq/news_show. php?sel=100&select=FAQ&show=9&cat =Eine percent20Freikirche percent20stellt percent20sich percent20vor (cited September 9, 2004).
Dwyer, James A. “The Methodist Episcopal Church in Germany, 1933-1945.”PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1978.
EKD: Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland— EKD and Kirchen. “Gliedkirchen der EKD.” http://www.ekd.de/ekd_kirchen/3221_gli edkirchen_adressen.html (cited September 9, 2004).
Freikirchenhandbuch—I nformationen— Anschriften—Berichte. Wuppertal: Borkhaus-Verlag, June 2000.
Voigt, Karl Heinz. “Die Methodistenkirche in Deutschland.” Geschichte der Evangelisch-methodistischen Kirche: Weg, Wesen und Auftrag des Methodismus unter besonderer Berucksichtigung der deutschsprachigen Lander Europas. Eds. Karl Steckel and C. Ernst Sommer. Stuttgart: Christliches Verlagshaus, 1982, 85-112.
Watchtower: Official Web Site of Jehovah’s Witnesses. “Statistics: 2003 Report of Jehovah’s Witnesses Worldwide.” http://www.watchtower.org/statistics/worl dwide_report.htm (cited September 9, 2004).
Wuthrich, Paul. “Die Evangelische Gemeinschaft im deutschsprachigen Europa.” Geschichte der Evangelisch- methodistischen Kirche: Weg, Wesen und Auftrag des Methodismus unter besonderer Berucksichtigung der deutschsprachigen Lander Europas. Eds. Karl Steckel and C. Ernst Sommer. Stuttgart: Christliches Verlagshaus, 1982, 149-211.